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I was, for unrelated reasons, thinking about the "Machine of Death" duology from ~a decade ago (in which you had ~30 writers all writing short stories with the premise "what if a machine at CVS could take your blood sample and give you a one-word description of your cause of death"), and I think as I try to remember the premises of the individual stories, a trend emerges. The first book, IIRC, was mostly jokey Asimovian AS YOU KNOW twist ending pieces (which are fun! I love Asimovian AS YOU KNOW twist ending pieces!) with the exception of one piece called, um, "Miscarriage" (skull emoji), but with the second book, having exhausted all that stuff early on meant that (again, IIRC) you started getting really abstract high-concept stuff. (I distinctly remember a story that between 216 seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, etc into a girl's life.) Fun seeing people, many of them amateur fiction writers, go from Golden Age to New Wave in, like, two years.

Again - only tangentially related to this very cool seeming book! I am laughing at that concrete poetry in the Ellison excerpt. I really should get into some of his stuff!!

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May 9·edited May 9Author

Not tangential -- it seems really cool, and I'll have to check it out. It seems very twee (in a good, nostalgic way) and kind of like outsider art. And a brief Wikipedia search tells me that its bestseller status pissed off Glenn Beck? je adore

Update: checking it out. There's a comic of a T-Rex making jokes about cheeseburgers. I've fallen through a crack in the universe and have reemerged in 2010

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